This is a long shot, but anyway. This is a family story thats been handed down for years. When my grandpa was a young man, early 1900's, he took his elderly parents with him on some sharecropping venture in another part of the state, actual place now forgotten. Incidentally they lived in northern Pope county at that time. At some point they had stopped to eat lunch beside the road. The old man started telling them about an incident he had been involved in during the Civil War, when he was a Union soldier in the 8th Missouri Cavalry. They had captured some wagons, gunpowder, etc, from the Confederates. Rather than carry everything with them they loaded one of the wagons with the stuff they didnt want or need & set it afire then they rolled it into a pond or slough. Then they threw the powder onto the blazing wagon & ran. The explosion must have been tremendous, blowing mud water & debris everywhere. He was sure they were in the vicinity were the event had taken place and he had my grandpa drive him around the area to look for the pond. After a few hours they gave up. Too much land had been cleared, the old mans memory too dim. They had to travel on & the old man was dissappointed.
I have studied the 8th Missouri for years, copying everything about their service from the O.R. for the years 1864-65 when my gr-grandpa served. The regimental returns, individual soldiers files, everything I could find. I realize that not everything made it into the record books, but I still think something like this would have been recorded. I have never found any thing describing an event like this & thought I never would. Just recently I came across something that piqued my interest. When the war ended the 8th Missouri was sent to Camden in June 1865 to paroll the Confederates who were coming in. A Union Gen. McGinnis set up his headquarters at Camden. He made a report that month that one of the 8th Missouri patrols had went to Magnolia in Columbia county were they found or captured 2 CSA cannons, then a few miles away 2 more cannons, as well as wagons, teams, arms. He didnt say anything else about it, but it got me wondering if maybe this was the incident my ancestor described. Maybe they destroyed the powder & a wagon to keep from carrying it all back.
Its a long shot but I wondered if anyone with knowledge of the war in that part of the state ever heard of any ordnance being destroyed like this? I realize that over the years some of the details of the story may have been changed just because of retelling, but I think basically thats it. I would appreciate anyone opinions or thoughts.
David Casto